No matter how careful she is, no matter how her bigass purse teems with delicate, fluttery paper products and hand lotion and tampons and aspirin and band aids, there will come a time in every woman's life when she's faced with a desperate pee situation. A toilet will be clogged, a bathroom inaccessible, the line for the bar's commode buzzing with bug-eyed coke users who can't wait to spend 10 minutes in there jabbering about how they're best friends now and isn't this music awesome? She will have to take a piss in a place that isn't a traditional sit-down toilet situation, and so will you. Here's how to do it without getting pee all over yourself, getting arrested, or accidentally urinating for an audience.

Advertisement

Before we talk about urinating in sinks and on dumpsters and in Pringles cans and the such, let me stress that I'm not advocating breaking into a stranger's house and pissing into his house plants. But I'm also not judging whatever circumstances led to you being in a place so uncivilized that it doesn't even have proper toilet fixtures in the first place. Maybe you and your friend went home with some dudes who promised that they had a party at their house, but the party turned out to be "their roommate watching Scarface and shots of Popov vodka chased with swigs of regular Pepsi from a shared can" and then by the time you leave their house at 3:30 am (which of course is in West Bumblefuck, the Land of No Cabs), you realize that it's a 20 minute walk to the nearest train station and there's nary a 24 hour cafe in sight. Or maybe you made the mistake of going camping, or hiking. If there's no sit down pee opportunity in your immediate future, mistakes were likely made. But they're by no means insurmountable.

Indoors

My alma mater had only single-sex dorms and very strict visiting hours in a hilariously ineffective attempt to curtail premarital fucking (OK- the rule may have been sort of effective at curtailing fucking, but it definitely didn't put a stop to awkward hand jobs/overly enthusiastic fingerblasting). Boys' dorms had much less strict enforcement of the visiting hours than girls' dorms, and thus if a young co-ed was interested in some after-hours canoodling with a male student, she'd stay at his place. But how to avoid being busted by an RA while on a midnight bathroom run? Avoid the bathroom. Piss in the sink.

Advertisement

It's less gross than you'd think, as long as you're careful and in control of your pee stream, and as long as you clean up after yourself, it's not a terrible toilet alternative. Make sure to remove toothbrushes and any other hygiene products from the area. Turn on the water and go, slowly. Once you're done, do a courtesy rinse with hot water. A sink's also a great place to pee if the toilet's so clogged that you're not comfortable putting one of your orifices near it.

If the sink's not an option, consider peeing in another place that has a drain, like the shower, and wash it down with a rinse of water. And if there's no shower or sink or drain in sight, consider peeing in a waterproof container with a mouth wide enough to catch your erratic ladypee — anything from a Pringles can to an empty Tupperware container to the tiny box that normally contains what shreds remain of your dignity. And a little bit of pee never killed a house plant (a lot of pee probably would, but a little bit isn't bad) so once you've peed in a container, consider dumping it on a plant.

Outdoors

So you've gone camping. Hopefully you timed the trip so it occurs during a time that you're not menstruating, as menstruation on camping trips attracts jokes about how periods attract bears, and period-bear jokes are one of the leading causes of awkward silence on co-ed camping trips.

Sponsored

In addition to being terrible, camping can put you in an awkward position when it comes to W. C. accessibility — if you're truly roughing it, there's probably no bathroom for miles on account of the fact that nature hates women.

But you can defeat Mother Nature with a little creative maneuvering. Find some gently sloping terrain. If you're in a relatively flat area, survey the area for change in grade in the ground. Size up that shit like you're the Tiger Woods of public urination. Pull your pants down as far as you can without taking them off. Squat down, but lean back as far as you can, with your ass pointing downhill. This will be an awkward position that requires you to arch your back a lot, but trust: you do not want to accidentally urinate on your pants. Go slowly, being careful to maintain your balance (falling backward into a stream of pee mixed with loamy forest soil would be the stuff of Ben Stiller Everything Goes Wrong movies, if Ben Stiller had a vagina).

Advertisement

Advertisement

The same terrain awareness principle applies to peeing in alleys. Ass down, face up. That's the way we like to piss.

In urban areas, pee in locations that aren't viewable by passers by; you don't want to end up getting slapped with a fine for having to exercise a bodily function in public. And for God's sake, don't pee on someone's private property or on school grounds — if you get cited for pissing at the base of a slide that kids play on, you deserve to be placed on a list of public urinators and forced to introduce yourself to future neighbors, "Hello. I am an idiot, and I am moving in next door. I may pee on your stuff. I can't control myself around monkey bars."

On the Road

I like to imagine that most people on the interstate at any given time have cars full of urine bottles or are running from the law in Californey, and so, given the general weirdness of everyone else around you, peeing by the roadside is not a big deal at all. Just pull over, stick your butt out of the car and give the shoulder a golden shower.

Advertisement

If you end up in a disgusting truck stop bathroom, rather than sitting on a seat that is covered with germs that have been hoarding firearms and vintage Ron Paul newsletters in preparation for a race war, pee standing up. Remove leg of your pants (or underwear, if you were sensible enough to wear a much more pee-friendly skirt while traveling), face the wall while straddling the toilet, and pee straight down. According to a friend who swears by this method for beach bathrooms, it's "liberating."

So you made some shitty choices and now you're going to have to pee somewhere that isn't designed for you to pee on it? So what? If you really think about it, the entire world is your toilet, if you only open your mind to its possibilities. You make your own bed, you pee in it, you shining, tinkling little star.